


the answer is ever out of reach

by ncfan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Speculation, Canonical Character Death, Changing Tenses, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Force Bonds, Gaslighting, Gen, Introspection, Intrusive Thoughts, Isolation, Kylo Ren is a Mess, POV Second Person, Shippy Gen, Spoilers, The Force, Trauma, and not the most reliable narrator, disturbing imagery, emotional isolation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 15:37:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13251282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Do you ever know who you are?





	the answer is ever out of reach

_“Do you know who you are_?”

The voice comes to you as if in a dream, so many times, when you are yet a small child and you still think waking dreams to be as normal as breathing. It asks you that question, singsong and mocking, “ _Do you know who you are? Of course you don’t. How could you, as you are now, so limited, so blinkered?”_

When you are a small child, you do not understand the full import of this question. You think, perhaps foolishly or perhaps not unreasonably, that this simply has to do with your name.

You are variously ‘Ben Organa’ or ‘Ben Solo’ depending who it is who addresses you. You’re Ben Organa to your parents. Your father likes to say that it’s Organa on your birth certificate; that’s good enough for him, and if it’s good enough for him, it should be good enough for the galaxy. To your mother, you are Organa for other reasons, reasons that exist in the dead, empty patches where other people bearing the name ‘Organa’ used to live. You are Organa because of the gentle touch of her mind upon yours, like spring sunlight, because of the memories of a shattered world she imparts to you. You are Ben Organa because she is _Leia_ Organa. You are Organa because someone in the wide galaxy _must_ be.

To your uncle, you are Ben Solo, to be corrected by one of your parents. He grimaces and nods, murmurs, _‘Organa, that’s right,’_ but he always forgets at some point, always goes back to calling you Solo. You’re not sure why, and after a while, you stop trying to correct him yourself. Chewbacca calls you Ben Solo (or as closely as Shyriiwook can approximate the name), and no one tries to stop him. As with your uncle, you don’t get the sense that it’s meant as an insult—it is, in some people’s mouths. It’s just something else for you to be called, something meant with all the affection the galaxy can muster.

Still, however benignly meant, it strikes at something in you that is… Not fractured, not exactly. Not yet. But perhaps brittle.

You have thoughts, images and sounds and myriad other sensations in your head, things unfitting of a Jedi. Blood clouds the air like mist, as your heart hammers in your chest, so hard you think it might burst, and your ears are filled with screams, words you cannot make out through the mists that cloud your ears, faces you cannot make out through the mists that cloud your eyes. They are there all the time, no matter what you do to banish them. Meditation doesn’t help. Telling yourself that they are wrong doesn’t help. Still they remain, coming to you whenever you are unsettled.

They can all see it. Your uncle stares at you when he thinks you are unaware of his scrutiny; you can feel his disquiet through the Force. At first, when you were sent to train with him, he was easy with you, prone to smile and joke; now he is more apt to frown, and treat you as if you are made of glass. He doesn’t speak with you much outside of lessons, anymore. He just stares. (You catch yourself waiting. What for, you don’t know. But there must be some resolution to this, somehow.)

The other students… You were, to start with, not a close companion of your classmates. You are the only child at the Temple; the rest are adults, most around the same age your uncle was when he began his training, though some are older. There was never a recipe for close friendship, though you got on well with some of your classmates at the first. But as those thoughts keep coming to you, as your stomach churns and your blood boils at the smallest frustrations, as your temper frays and frays and frays, they begin to change. They hover at windows and doorways, watching and whispering, considering, _waiting_.

They can see you. They can see your anger, your terrible thoughts, the darkness which clouds your mind. They know, they know, they know everything you wish to conceal. You are naked before their discerning eyes, helpless to hide what lies inside. You are watched. You are _always_ watched.

You are Ben Solo or Ben Organa, depending on who addresses you, and you are to be a Jedi, but how can you be these things when you are as you are? When you harbor thoughts unfitting of a Jedi, unworthy of your parents’ son? ( _Your parents who sent you away, your parents who fume and argue and go separate paths, your parents who sent you away, your mother who thought it best for you to be gone and your father who didn’t wish it but acceded anyways, but your parents, still._ )

Slowly, inexorably, you find yourself being drawn away. Away from the path and into the woods, out of sight of shore, over the edge of the map, you are being drawn away.

Until

one night

green light cleaves the night in twain

his eyes

(oh, his _eyes_!)

and, hands soaked in blood, you know not what you are, not at all.

Until Snoke finds you, until he coaxes you gently back onto the path.

Your own judgment is… inadequate. Any attempt on your part to find an answer would only meet in failure. How can you know who you are, what path you are to take? You have proven utterly unequal to the task. When Snoke shows you the truth, shows you your future as if it has already played out, it is a relief. When he takes your turmoil away, it is a relief.

The Republic can give you no answers, because it is corrupt.

Your parents can give you no answers, because they are weak.

Your uncle can give you no answers, because he has blinded himself.

The Light can give you no answers, because there is no truth in it, no power.

There is truth in Darkness if you let it speak to you, Snoke tells you. Your purpose lies far away from the Jedi, weak and foolish and corrupt. If you are to be Kylo Ren, you must cleanse the Force of the Light’s corruption, you must purge the galaxy of all that remains of the Jedi. The Force must be made pure, unadulterated Darkness, and then, then you shall have your answers. You must finish what your grandfather and the old Emperor started, and were unable to finish, for both died, and one lost himself to Light in the final hour of his life.

You are Kylo Ren, and for a time, that is enough. You walked paths so flooded with Light that you could not tell where they led, could not see the way before you, but now you know the way. You have had true wisdom imparted upon you by someone who sees more clearly than you, who can see which way your path will lead you, even if you cannot. For a time, it is a relief.

You plunge into Darkness, and it does not feel like drowning—at first. It feels like coming home.

At first.

When again you begin to feel the pull, it is at first easier to put from your mind. It is gentler than the hooks and snares that saw you cast down into Darkness, and this time, you have the guidance of someone truly wise, someone who did not recoil from you from the very start (That must have been the case with Luke Skywalker, even if he concealed it, if it could ever have been possible for him to—). Light is easier to quell than Darkness; it is easier to snuff out a pinprick of light than to illuminate the whole of a lightless cavern, after all.

You put it from your mind.

At first.

But what is hidden must inevitably see the light of day. What is concealed must inevitably reveal itself. Those thoughts come back to you, the unshakable thoughts of your childhood, oh, what is impossible to banish fully, oh the screaming and the blood, but the cast is different. As a child, you had these thoughts, and they gave you pleasure for your subconscious recognition that it was your future, your _right_ future. But you were a child raised in ignorance, with teachers ignorant and wrong-headed, so when the thoughts roosted in your mind and stayed there, you felt guilt. When you still thought yourself, wrongly, to be a Jedi, you were consumed by thoughts and desires unfitting of a Jedi, and you were ashamed. The guilt dogged your every step.

Now, what clouds your waking sight and haunts your dreams is the screams. The blood. The burning.

There is no pleasure in it. It is right and just, purging the galaxy of corruption, but the images that burn themselves into your eyes, it is not pleasure they bring you. Instead, you find yourself cringing away from them, flinching away in horror of what you see, both what has come to pass ( _what you have done_ ), and all that might be.

It is wrong. It was your grandfather’s great failing, at the very end of his life, to give in to sentiment and become one with the Force clouded by Light. That is what Snoke told you, and it is your duty to finish what he started, so long ago, when he destroyed the Jedi. Such thoughts are unworthy of you, when it is your duty, the only right thing, to cleanse the galaxy.

These thoughts care nothing for what your conscious mind knows to be true. They are there all the time, no matter what you do to banish them. Meditation doesn’t help. Telling yourself that you are in the right in what you do doesn’t help. No matter how you fight against it, no matter how you struggle, no matter how you claw at the Force to maintain the equilibrium you found after Snoke found you, you still find yourself slowly, reluctantly drawn away.

Everyone can sense it. The other acolytes of your master, they are… You were never close with them. The path you walk is one that requires absolute purity, and is difficult to walk when your mind is clouded by attachment to others. Such has Snoke told you, and such is what you believe; he is wise, and knows these things better than you know them yourself. It is not an easy thing to be alone, but if it is what is required, then it must be so. You are not close to the other acolytes, but even then, they can sense your weakness. They watch you whenever you are with them, whispering. Over the years, one by one they fall into death, until few remain, but those who survive watch you still, with the blissful incomprehension of those who have never suffered the same turmoil.

The First Order officers, they watch you too, some with caution and others, such as Hux, with open contempt. There have been other Dark Side acolytes in the past, you gather, who destabilized and died like rabid dogs. They, many of them, Hux forefront among them, expect you to fall to a thousand pieces and, one way or another, no longer feature in their daily lives before too long. Some treat you with cold politeness, others with something that edges on open contempt and almost hungry anticipation.

Supreme Leader Snoke…

Can anything be more demoralizing than Snoke’s disappointment? You cannot hide it from him, no matter how you might try. He can sense your turmoil whenever you are in his presence, and even when you are not. Whether he sighs and shakes his head, whether he gives a gentle rebuke or a prediction of where your future will lead if you do not seal the fissures in your psyche, there is nothing quite like Snoke’s disappointment to remind you of how unworthy you are, when the thoughts enter your mind.

And yet they remain.

_He cannot give you the answers you seek_. The thoughts don’t just dog you with emotions unworthy of Kylo Ren. They drip poison in your ears, trying by guile to fill you with doubt and distrust. They whisper to you that Snoke, wise as he is, has given you no surefire solution to your conflict, instead caring only to criticize. _He cannot give you the answers you seek, or he knows how, but deliberately withholds them from you. Why do that, if he is acting in your interests?_

Your treacherous mind also happens to be wrong, in this case. Eventually, Snoke informs you that there is… there is a test you can undergo. Something that will heal all the splits in your soul if you can pass the test.

_Re-forge your heart in fire, is that what he suggests? Melt it down and fashion it into a whole shape, one without any faults or impurities? Or does he wish simply to see his foes struck down, and knows that you are the most able to accomplish that._

Your treacherous mind continues dripping poison in your ear, even when the truth is so obvious.

An old objective becomes more urgent, finding Luke Skywalker before he can train more Jedi to pollute the Force with Light. (You must face him when he is found. You must face him, just as surely as you must face… them. You still see his eyes in your dreams, in deep, dark space, his eyes like mirrors for green light. You must face that. You must face that? How can you ever face _that_?)

The Resistance grows ever more troublesome. (You know who leads them. It can only be Leia Organa, your mother, and all too soon there is proof. The Resistance are the dogs of that corrupt, sluggish beast, the Republic, and like the Republic it must fall if the galaxy is to be made pure again. Your mother must— If the galaxy is the be pure, if the Force is to be in balance, she must—)

A technological terror nears completion. ( _Do you remember the tales your mother told you? Do you remember all she told you when you were small? Do you remember Alderaan, its mountains and lakes and great forests? Do you remember what she told you of her parents, not her true parents but the parents who raised her? Do you remember what would scream in her mind when her tales inevitably withered in her mouth? How you felt, how_ she _felt?_ )

And there is an awakening in the Force. (Sometimes, when you wake, there is a taste in your mouth as though you have swallowed sand.)

The girl, the scavenger girl with the map in her head, the girl who fled Jakku in your father’s ship, she feels it, too. She’s felt the same things you have, the confusion, the pull of the Light, the horrible sense of displacement that comes with not knowing who you are. It is a shameful thing; you should be ashamed. That you feel the same things as a girl who, however strong in the Force she might be, is untrained, has been raised in utter ignorance, it is a shameful thing. But that shame is tinged with relief. Here is someone who feels the same things you feel, who is torn and struggling with who and what she is, just as you are; you are not as alone as you thought. Shame tinged with relief, and something else, though you know not what, and if you feel a sense of kinship, the feeling is certainly not mutual. She doesn’t wish to let go of ignorance any more than you did when you were a child, and her sheer power creates… problems.

And there is something else.

You sense him the moment he arrives on the planet. It has been years and years and he gave you up when you were but a child, but you know. Oh, you know, his presence in the Force is like slipping back into childhood, ever more uncertain, ever more disgracefully timid. This is the test. This is the _moment_ that will make you whole again if only you can seize it, but you _don’t_ seize it. You know exactly where he is in the base—your mind may be clouded, but your ability to sense others with the Force is _not_ —but you do not seek him out. Chewbacca is with him. The traitor is with him. The girl is with him. You do not seek him out. Your heart is weak, and a part of it hopes that his path never crosses with yours.

Not to be. Not to be. Han Solo is as weak and foolish as his son. He comes to you.

_How old he has become_. What a foolish thing to think, and yet it bobs up to the surface of your mind. It has been years and years, more than fifteen years, since last you laid eyes on your father, and he was not a young man even then. But his face is lined and haggard, his hair gone all gray, his voice weaker than it was when you were a child, and though he stands just as straight and tall as you ever remember, he seems… shrunken. Diminished. You’ve known for years that he was a disappointment, but somehow, when you were a child, he seemed… greater.

This is the moment of truth.

This.

He steps forward

closer

closer

presents you with the final temptation

and then

red light cleaves the dark in twain

his eyes

(oh, his eyes!)

and what should have made you whole again instead breaks you in two, beyond any hope of repair.

Who are you?

What are you?

You cannot say. You bested the traitor in combat, but that is hardly any great feat; he was only a stormtrooper, blind to the Force, and knew next to nothing of lightsaber combat. No feat that Kylo Ren could call great. You are not Ben Solo; the other called Solo has just— You just— Your grandfather’s lightsaber responded to the girl’s pull and not yours. Any claim to being a Skywalker or an Organa shrivels away at that.

And despite her lack of training with a lightsaber, she is cunning enough to call upon the Force and take advantage of your… disorder to defeat you.

You wonder why you made her that offer, why you would ever make her that offer, when you had her at your mercy. There was a moment during the battle when you could have killed her, but when the moment came, you offered to teach her instead. Had the test really broken you so badly, to make you think that not only would Snoke consent to you taking a student when he never had before, but that he would allow you to take on a student who clung so fiercely to ignorance, who had blocked the First Order’s efforts any way she could? And yet, the idea of killing her… You couldn’t. You just couldn’t.

You’re weak.

You’re weak.

You’re weak.

You’re weak, Snoke tells you, and in your weakness you have betrayed yourself. If you were stronger, meeting the test head on would have made you whole again. You would have come away from it with clarity, knowing exactly who you were, and completely certain of what you must do. If you were stronger, it would have burned all doubt away. You would have been free.

But you’re weak. He stares down upon you, cold and considering. You are weak, so weak that instead of sealing up the cracks, the test split you heart and soul, the reflection of the scar on your face. You are still the broken child he plucked from a freighter drifting dead in space. No, it’s worse than that. You’re still the broken child who was sent to Luke Skywalker a lifetime ago, the broken child who woke one night to green light and a betrayal that turned cracks into fissures. You’re just a frightened child in a mask.

But Snoke…

Snoke was wrong, too.

He presented to you a face of infallible wisdom, but he was wrong. He had said that you would be strong enough to face the test and come out of it made whole, but he was wrong. He has no answers for you. What has been staring you in the face for years, without you ever being willing to face it, has suddenly become a truth as simple as the presence of the Force in all things that live. He has no answers for you, and is instead only interested in making rebukes. If he has no answers for you and yet considers you weak, what is his use for you?

( _Why,_ why _, must your father’s words make sense to you after you—)_

Maybe it’s time to stop being a child in a mask. But even if you are to stop being that, what _are_ you going to be? How can you be anything else?

The corridors grow narrow, the walls close, the air stale and thin. How are you supposed to be anything but what you are, the broken child who cast away his mask, when you are where you are? For the first time, you perceive how your sanctuary can be a cage, when it is no longer something that gives you comfort.

You perceive how the path you have run down can be a noose around your neck, when you feel your mother’s presence aboard the Resistance cruiser.

She… She… You killed your father and it weakened you, when you had believed that it would make you whole, give you clarity of purpose. You had believed that you would finally be confident of who you are, and instead you were left even less sure.

Now, now, now, now you have never been less sure in your life of just who you are. You can feel her, and you know she can feel you. You feel the touch of her mind on yours, no longer spring sunlight but like tendrils of ice, so cold it burns. Has she grown old and gray like your father, shrunken and diminished? You can hardly imagine, but the touch of her mind is so different that it’s just… You don’t remember her sorrow ever being like this. When you were a child her sorrow came in fits and spurts that were quickly channeled into productivity. Leia Organa did not wallow in grief. Leia Organa _worked_ through her grief, worked and worked until it was burned away. Grief only turned her into the unstoppable force, that which could overturn even the immovable object.

Grief isn’t supposed to drown her mind.

She’s not weak, like you.

Your finger hovers over the trigger and all you can see is her face, smooth and unlined as it was when you were very small, when she taught you how to read, when you brought home your first school reports, when she had days off from work and you could spend your day with her. You don’t hear her voice. You’ve… you’ve forgotten. You just feel her there in your mind, bent under the burden of her grief, like coming home and finding that all the walls are bare and everyone else who lived there is dead.

You know better than this. She’s not just your mother; she is the leader of the Resistance, and her death is one of the highest priorities of the First Order. Of all the things you are not, you are certainly _not_ Ben Organa anymore. You’re not Ben Organa. Your mind is screaming, your throat burning, your heart splitting at the seams. You’re not Ben Organa. You’re—

Your hand falls away from the trigger.

But if you choose at the last moment to turn aside, you find this means nothing. You chose to turn aside. Your wingmen did not. Last Organa in the galaxy, no Organa at all. How quickly can any decision you make be rendered utterly meaningless.

Out of that, there comes something so bewildering that you scarcely know how to make sense of it.

She isn’t really here, on this ship. Her blaster isn’t really here either, though the shot certainly feels real enough. The pain passes in time. Physical wounds are simpler like that, and this has the advantage of being a phantom injury, something that inflicts pain but leaves no physical damage.

She’s not really here, the scavenger girl from Jakku, and yet you see her standing before you, a glimmer of light in the gloom that pervades the corner of the ship. It isn’t possible for her to be deliberately projecting her presence through the Force. To do so would require far more mastery of the Force than she possesses, and more importantly, the strain of it, even doing it once, would kill her. She didn’t strike you as the sort to waste her life over such a hollow gesture. And you hardly get the sense she _wants_ to be here.

You could just be going mad, but the pain from the phantom blaster shot discredits that idea. You have little knowledge of psychiatry, but you don’t think hallucinations can spawn real pain. A Force vision? She doesn’t have the feeling of a vision; certainly, what visions you’ve had in the past tended to be more esoteric than what just happened. It’s her. It’s as though she really is right here.

She’s with Skywalker. Of course she is. As if your failure couldn’t be any more complete than it already is, you couldn’t even prevent Skywalker from taking on a new student to train in the Light. (You catch yourself wondering if she will fare any better with him than you did; you sensed a kernel of Dark in her when you fought, and even if only a kernel, Skywalker abhors the Dark enough to— It’s useless to wonder such things about an enemy. It borders on treason to wander such things about an enemy, when the thoughts are coupled with the particular strain of unease cutting a path through your mind.) Another problem to contend with, if you can’t find Skywalker’s sanctuary before her training is complete.

And now this.

She calls you a monster, and for a moment you revel in the idea of what a monster could _be_. A monster could be free of everything that shackles a man to the path he walks. A monster could be free of the past, free of attachment, free of longing and sorrow and _guilt_.

For a moment, you would love to be a monster. But you know better. You are only a man, a weak and foolish man, and regardless of what is building inside of you, you are unequal to the task of breaking your chains.

She demands to know why you would kill your father, and you have no answer to give. How can you tell her that it was utterly without meaning, that it was a test that was no test, that it should have made you whole but split you open instead. You find yourself wondering, numbly, at the fact that she can feel devotion enough to Han Solo, after knowing him for such a short amount of time, to demand answers for his death. You saw in her mind how alone she was on Jakku, deserted to fend for herself at a cruelly young age. How alone must someone be to latch on to someone so unreliable, someone who walked casually into their life and had every intention of walking back out, just as he always had? (You know. It’s like ripping your wounds open and mixing salt into the blood, but you know.) But she transmits her grief, edged with fury and disbelief, so powerfully through the Force that you can’t find it in you to say that. If she has found her truth, let her have it. It makes little difference to you, when it’s too late for the truth to change anything.

It goes on, while battle rages in dead space. Your mother is (still) dead. The Resistance fleet still teeters on the edge of annihilation, just escaping the jaws of death. You don’t know the reason for this, and you hardly care, in light of everything else that haunts your mind.

You try, fitfully, to trick her into revealing Skywalker’s location, but without any conviction, and she can see right through it, anyways. It quickly becomes almost like a game to the two of you. Not friendly, not quite. Tinged with boredom and caution, too much so to really qualify as anything approaching ‘friendly.’ But her voice loses the bite it had, and you find yourself, without meaning to, enjoying it. How long has it been since you last spoke to someone like this, so casually, when hostility dribbles away into mere irritation, and then something that isn’t even that? How long has it been since you spoke to someone who wanted to speak to you, even if it was just to relieve boredom? Longer than you care to remember.

You can sense her frustration growing, but it’s not directed at you, and it’s mingled with something else. Wherever she is, it is somewhere utterly alien to her experiences on Jakku—you cannot see it, but you can feel rain hitting your face (you had forgotten, another thing you had forgotten)—and to her, it is wondrous, but… But it isn’t what she had thought it would be.

When you feel the sharp knife of loneliness cutting through you, ever upwards towards your heart, you’re not sure if it’s hers, or yours. Maybe it’s both of you, together. Incredible, how quickly you’ve become uncertain. The bite of frustration, though, that’s all her. “Is the great Luke Skywalker not what you thought he’d be?” you ask quizzically, scanning her face.

She starts, as though she’d not even realized the connection had been re-established. You find yourself wincing, wishing almost that you had kept your silence, though you don’t know why. She turns her head sharply and stares at you, intent, as though trying to pry your mind open to see what lies inside. It ought to be easy for her. Others have done it, and that has been done to you so many times that the hinges of your mind ought to seem well-oiled to someone with her kind of power. After you rooted through her mind and she rooted through yours, on Starkiller Base, it wouldn’t surprise you. But she doesn’t do that. She doesn’t even try. She leaves your mind be.

It is, as everything always is, far too complicated.

You think… you think you know of something you could do, but fear roots your plan to the ground, and does not let it grow. You are fearful, and your fear paralyzes you.

And there is something else spawning doubt inside of you.

She says nothing at first, and her silence grows more alarming with each passing moment. She’s dripping wet, soaked to the bone, face white, teeth chattering, eyes wild. Even lightyears away she smells of brine (She’s from a desert planet, has lived there most of her life. Does she even know how to _swim_?). Her wild eyes stare right through you, as though she can’t see you, until finally you hear yourself asking, “What happened to you?”

It’s like a switch is flipped in her mind. Her brown eyes come back into focus, and the raw, slack look on her face is one so lost that it makes you hurt just to look at it. “I…” Her voice cracks. She swallows thickly, and you can taste bile in the back of your throat. “…Something happened to me.”

She tells you a strange tale, haltingly at first, but her voice grows stronger and steadier and she goes on. Or… not so strange, perhaps. All things are possible with the Force, and as her tale goes on, you realize that what she tells you bears some resemblance to other tales you have heard.

She is still chary on the details of the world she currently inhabits; she might, for whatever reason, feel the need to tell this tale to you and not Skywalker, but she is hardly willing enough to take you into her confidence enough to tell you where she is. That… You find it doesn’t matter to you. Not as much as it would have just a few hours ago. Finding Skywalker doesn’t matter as much to you as what she tells you.

On the planet where Luke Skywalker has taken refuge, there is a… She doesn’t know what to call it. She grew up on a desert planet. If you had to guess from the description she gives you, you would say it is a blowhole, but you don’t say as much. It isn’t your place to speak. This isn’t your story.

On the planet where Luke Skywalker has taken refuge, there is a place that is strong with the Dark Side of the Force. Skywalker hasn’t been much of a teacher, and she has perhaps finally seen that there is no truth in Light. She went to that place for the answers she seeks.

Her parents… Your heart feels oddly tight when she tells you. She wanted to know about her parents. She asked the cave to show them to her, and it showed her a hall of mirrors instead, leading on and on forever. Undaunted, she walked on for what felt like an eternity, hearing neither the wind nor the crashing waves above, seeing nothing but herself and gray emptiness. She walked and walked until she came to the last mirror, so scratched and blurred that she could see nothing clearly through it. She asked again to see the parents who left her alone so long ago, and eventually the mirror cleared. And showed her nothing but herself.

“I thought I would find answers. But there were none. I had never felt so alone.”

There is a strain of quiet desolation in her voice that strikes your heart like a knife. “You’re not alone,” you blurt out without thinking, the only impulse able to enter your mind the one to lessen the weight that’s making her shoulders sag.

She blinks. She’s silent, and you think you can hear, faintly from lightyears away, waves crashing against the rocks. Then, her face softens slightly. “Neither are you,” she murmurs.

There is nothing you can say to that. The cold of your ship presses in on you. Your heart is screaming in your chest; it feels as if it will burst. If you tried to speak, all you would be able to do is sob.

Why she would want to touch you, you don’t know. Why _anyone_ would want to touch you, you don’t know, let alone her. Doesn’t she think… But maybe she’s realized that a monster would have strength enough to break its chains. You don’t know why, you have _no idea_ why, but she’s holding her hand out to you, unflinching.

The last time someone touched you gently, it was… No. You don’t want to remember that.

It’s not the same as touching someone who is actually there on the ship with you. In your heart, you had hoped it would. You took off your glove hoping, despite all the reasons you knew it wouldn’t happen that way, that you would feel her hand in yours, the physical touch of skin on skin. Instead, it’s like… It’s so hard to describe. It’s like touching sunlight, soft and warm.

In that warmth, you can see the future. But you can also see the past.

You need to tell her.

She needs to know, she _deserves_ to know, even if it hurts, even if she has blinded herself to it to give herself hope. The Dark gave her the answers she was looking for, even if she couldn’t see it at the time. You know now, you have certainty. The past needs to die if either of you are to are to move on to the future, but before it can die it must be faced. That’s the only way… You think, you think that it is the only way the past can stop giving either of you pain.

The connection is broken, but you have a chance, soon enough. In the end, you didn’t need to come to Rey. Rey came to you.

Killing Snoke… It was easier than you had ever thought it would be. You thought it would be more difficult, more wrenching. You thought it would hurt more. But you can see Snoke clearly now, all too clearly, and if it’s a choice between him and her, you choose her. You know the truth.

There are still answers in the Dark, there is still truth there, if you search for it long enough. You can find yourself there, and you know she could too, if you searched together. You’ve never felt more clarity than you did when you were both fighting together, when your wills were joined together and focused on a single objective. It’s a sign. Neither of you have to be what you were, anymore. You can both be something else, you can be _anything_ you want, together. You can both be free, together.

Or not.

Or not, because at the end of it, she turns aside.

You want to be angry. You want to feel betrayed. You want to feel as though you could kill her, and you want to feel as though you could believe that killing her would free you.

No. Your heart has ever been weak, and killing Snoke did not make you strong. It did not break your chains. You are not a monster, only a man. You want to feel as though you could kill her, but instead all you feel is emptiness.

She knows who she is. And you?

_Do you know who you are?_

_No, not at all._


End file.
